Emerson Malonehttps://emersonmalone.wordpress.com
Writer, Photographer, & Podcast Producer.Mon, 11 Dec 2017 04:59:35 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngEmerson Malonehttps://emersonmalone.wordpress.com
Days of Hell: Terrence Malick and the creation of ‘The Thin Red Line’https://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/days-of-hell-terrence-malick-and-the-creation-of-the-thin-red-line/
https://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/days-of-hell-terrence-malick-and-the-creation-of-the-thin-red-line/#respondMon, 05 Jun 2017 00:49:12 +0000http://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/?p=669Read more Days of Hell: Terrence Malick and the creation of ‘The Thin Red Line’]]>Note: this is an academic paper that I wrote for a “U.S. Film Industry” class at the University of Oregon.

Days of Hell: Terrence Malick and the creation of The Thin Red Line

The two decades that spanned Terrence Malick’s absence from directing between his second film, Days of Heaven (1978), and his third, The Thin Red Line (1998), were a period of considerable institutional change in Hollywood. Malick began his career as a writer-director during the 1970s, when studios were eager to define themselves based on auteurist productions (Michaels 6). During his hiatus, the film industry had undergone intense deregulation; the market had transformed from a bevy of studios to a few multinational corporations that absorbed the smaller studios and created an oligopolistic, more restrictive landscape. The prolonged development, laborious production, and split reception of Line illustrates the high-risk investment in a single auteur’s vision, and why contemporary film studios are loath to indulge in it. The story behind Line’s creation is emblematic of how a visionary filmmaker of the New Hollywood movement can collide with a major film studio when he returns to work in the 1990s.

Development

The source material for The Thin Red Line is a 510-page war novel by James Jones, which was originally published in 1962 (Michaels 51–2). Although the book is largely fictionalized, it is based on Jones’s experience during the 1942 Guadalcanal Campaign (Patterson 22). This battle was integral to ending World War II, but combat in Line is almost beside the point. In 1964, it was adapted into an earnest, conventional war movie directed by Andrew Marton and released by Allied Arts (Michaels 52). Malick’s version would be the second adaptation of Jones’s novel (Michaels 51). The arduous effort to bring Jones’s novel back to the big screen reportedly began in 1988; while Malick was living in Paris, he offered to producer Bobby Geisler and John Roberdeau to adapt Jones’s novel (Abramowitz). The producers paid Malick $250,000 for the script (Young). Before Malick turned in the first draft, which was 300 pages long, they supplied him with ample inspiration for his research at his behest: a book about the reptiles and amphibians native to Australia, information on Navajo code talkers, and even helped support the mortgage for Malick and his wife Michele’s apartment in Paris (Abramowitz). Malick reportedly “agonized about every deviation from Jones’s novel, no matter how trivial” and sought consent with Jones’s widow (who also lived in Paris) to make any changes to the story (Abramowitz). A few years passed as Malick pursued and abandoned other projects. In early 1995, the producers finally told Malick to pick a film and complete it (Young). Mike Medavoy, Malick’s former agent who was establishing his own production company, Phoenix Pictures, gave Geisler and Roberdeau $100,000 to back Line (Biskind). Medavoy later made a deal to produce this film with Sony Pictures.

Geisler reportedly talked up Malick’s vision: Guadalcanal “would be a Paradise Lost, an Eden, raped by the green poison, as Terry used to call it, of war.” He also noted that much of the violence would not be present on screen, and rather than seeing a bloody injury, he said, “we see a tree explode, the shredded vegetation, and a gorgeous bird with a broken wing flying out of a tree” (Biskind). Three months before filming began in northern Australia, Sony dropped out of the deal; a studio executive doubted Malick could fulfill his ambitious feature with a $52 million budget (Biskind). Malick and Medavoy pitched the project to various studios; ultimately, 20th Century Fox offered $39 million, but requested that five A-list actors needed to be cast. The Japanese company Pioneer Films put up $8 million and Phoenix contributed $3 million (Patterson 121). When casting began, many prestigious actors eager to work with Malick had inundated him with requests. This led to meetings with Brad Pitt, Matthew McConaughey, Edward Norton, Gary Oldman, Al Pacino, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nicolas Cage, and Leonardo DiCaprio (Biskind). Many actors offered to take a substantial pay cut to be in the movie. Others took a pause from filming other movies to meet with Malick. Sean Penn, who was cast, told Malick: “Give me a dollar and tell me where to be” (Winter). Johnny Depp reportedly said something similar: “Let’s sign this napkin; you tell me where to show up, when, what to play.” (Biskind).

Despite the caveat from Fox, casting director Dianne Crittenden said that Malick “didn’t want to work with stars; his way was to make it as real as possible and to do that was to use people you didn’t recognize” [“Making The Thin Red Line,” Criterion Collection].

Production

Although Line was already a highly anticipated comeback for Malick, doubts surfaced early on in its production. The six months of filming in Australia, the Solomon Islands, and the U.S. started in June 1997. [“Making The Thin Red Line,” Criterion Collection]. Malick allegedly did not want to make a war movie [“Making The Thin Red Line,” Criterion Collection]. “I remember him wondering why he was [making] the movie,” said the film’s editor Leslie Jones. “He doesn’t like war. He’s not an action director; he would say, ‘I don’t know how to direct a battle scene, what am I doing?’” [“Making The Thin Red Line,” Criterion Collection]. Co-editor Saar Klein said that Malick suggested it’d be great to get another director to direct the combat scenes. “I don’t think [the war sequences] were his favorite part,” Klein said. Actor Ben Chaplin told Entertainment Weekly in a 1999 interview: “[Malick] never expected it to be this big thing with loads of men and machines. He had written this film about people and nature, and he got here and there was this war going on” (Young). In one scene, Malick instructed actor Kirk Acevedo with this: “You’re calling out into the abyss! And that’s what your motivation is” (Perez). Production designer Jack Fisk said that working with Malick is “exhausting” (Abramowitz). “Sometimes he’ll talk in metaphors,” said Fisk. “Sometimes he’ll show me a photograph or a painting. Sometimes he’ll just make a literary reference or talk about a piece of music” (Perez). Composer Hans Zimmer, as well, remarked that Line was the “hardest” movie of his career to score (“The Inside Film Interview with Hans Zimmer, Music Composer”). Malick wanted Zimmer to compose music before filming began. “I threw all my previous knowledge out the window. I wrote for nine months without a day off,” said Zimmer. “We spent an inordinate amount of time talking about colors, and these sorts of things. Most of the time we were having impractical, unpragmatic, philosophical conversations.” [“Making The Thin Red Line,” Criterion Collection] Zimmer reportedly wrote six hours of original music, a small percentage of which is in the final cut (Perez).

John Cusack told EW, “[Malick] wrote a script based on the novel, and he’s making a film based on the script, but he’s not shooting the script. He’s shooting the essence of the script, and he’s also shooting the movie that’s up there on the hill. He’s trying to transcend the book and the script and himself” (Young). He added: “I don’t know if this will make sense the way a normal film does” (Young).

John C. Reilly recalled one incident on a convoluted set at an army base, which included tents, trucks, hundreds of extras, and vintage airplanes taking off. While everyone was preparing to film an important shot, Terry spotted a red-tailed hawk and excitedly told cinematographer John Toll to get the camera. Reilly recalled, “We sat there for five or ten minutes while he got different angles of this bird flying through the sky” (Maher). Steadicam operator Brad Shield noted that Malick promised him a bottle of champagne if he got a shot of a specific eagle, an agreement that both men fulfilled, although Shield griped that Malick’s gift of Australian champagne is subpar to the French version (Maher). In the same interview, Shield said, “Terry wanted it to feel as though the audience has stumbled into the middle of a war” (Young).

On-set drama also unfolded between Malick and his two producers, Geisler and Roberdeau. Unbeknownst to them, Malick included a clause in his contract that they were barred from visiting the set (Young). As an EW writer investigated this story, he received an unsigned letter that called the two producers “imposters and confidence men who have no connection with Mr. Malick” (Young). Malick threatened to remove their names from the credits; eventually, Geisler and Roberdeau were banned from the 1999 Academy Awards ceremony (Michaels 58; Biskind). Geisler, himself, told EW: “I didn’t think [Malick] was capable of a betrayal of this magnitude” (Young).

During post-production, the raw cut was five hours long (Kiang). The editing process, in all, took 13 months, and an additional four months to mix (Kiang). Billy Bob Thornton recorded three hours of voiceover narration, all of which was scrapped and replaced with a collage of 8 narrators (Young). The ruthless editing process trimmed many major roles — such as those of Adrien Brody, George Clooney, and John Travolta — into momentary cameos. Brody elaborated on his dismay in an interview with The Independent: “I was so focused and professional, I gave everything to it, and then to not receive everything … in terms of witnessing my own work. It was extremely pleasant because I’d already begun the press for a film that I wasn’t really in” (Kiang). Other actors — Mickey Rourke, Bill Pullman, and Lucas Haas — were scrubbed out from the film entirely (Kiang). Earlier during production, characters were written for Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Jason Patric, and Viggo Mortensen, but these were all deleted before photography began (Kiang). Malick aimed to dramatically reduce the dialogue and replace it with voiceovers; during editing, he reviewed each reel without sound, and listened to a Green Day CD, says editor Leslie Jones (Maher). “I don’t think he was capable of seeing the movie as a whole during the process,” said Jones. “That was a big adjustment” [“Making The Thin Red Line,” Criterion Collection]. As Reilly noted, “Although we shot the script and we shot the story, the movie didn’t really resemble the script by the time he finished editing it.” (Maher). The final feature-length edit clocked in at 2 hours and 50 minutes (“The Thin Red Line (1998)” IMDb).

Distribution

The timing for Line coincided with two other World War II releases of the same year: Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation,” a retrospective book composed of interviews with veterans that became a bestseller, and Steven Spielberg’s war epic Saving Private Ryan, which was released five months before Malick’s film [“Saving Private Ryan (1998)”]. While these other works are more reverent and journalistic, this made it awkward and a tough sell for studios like Fox 2000 to market Malick’s film — an Emersonian treatise on human identity, God, war, and the barbarity inherent to nature, as inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Martin Heidegger, and other philosophers (Flanagan 127). In contrast to Paramount’s Ryan, Line was too esoteric, introspective, and unfocused. “Fox’s promotional campaign comprehensively failed to locate Line within public discourse surrounding WWII, something that Ryan had achieved with notable success,” writes Martin Flanagan, who adds that Fox opted “to separate [Line] from other artistic and public discourses concerning the war” (Patterson 127–8). This means that Line was pitched as an intellectual, albeit cerebral, substitute to the more historical, genuine films about the war.

The film was a joint production by Geisler-Roberdeau (the two initial producers who approached Malick), Fox 2000 Pictures (who picked up the film after Sony dropped out), and Phoenix Pictures (an LA-based independent studio that had just formed in 1995) (Biskind). Author Lloyd Michaels argues that culturally, it’s possible that America simply was not ready for a nonconformist war picture. “The economy was booming and the Soviet Union had recently imploded. America … had moved beyond the critical introspection and doubt of the Watergate era to a period of renewed national self-confidence in patriotism. Malick’s film, no matter how eagerly anticipated by connoisseurs of American cinema … hardly had a chance against Spielberg’s latest epic” (Michaels 59). In contrast to Ryan, a commercially more successful production, Line’s financial earnings were not as impressive.

Exhibition

The film received a limited release in five theatres on December 25, 1998, where its opening weekend gross was $282,534 (Box Office Mojo). Its wide release on January 15, 1999 screened the film in 1,528 theatres, where it grossed $9.7 million in its opening weekend (Box Office Mojo). Its domestic gross was $36,400,491 and internationally it grossed $61,726,074 (Box Office Mojo). It was distributed in 46 countries across six continents during February and March 1999 (“The Thin Red Line — Release Info”). The movie came out on DVD and VHS on November 2, 1999 (“The Thin Red Line — Release Info”). The Criterion Collection restored and re-released it on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2010 (“The Thin Red Line”).

Gene Siskel deemed the film to be “the finest contemporary war film I’ve seen,” and added that it’s superior to Oliver Stone’s Platoon and even Spielberg’s Ryan (Siskel & Ebert). Roger Ebert was less enthused and noted, “This film has no firm idea of what it is about, but that doesn’t make it bad. It is, in fact, sort of fascinating” (Ebert). Martin Scorsese called it his second-favorite film of the decade (Ebert). Owen Gleiberman with EW gave the movie a B- and said it could be “too paralyzingly high-minded to connect with audiences” (Gleiberman). Perhaps the most telling review of Line is from Jonathan Romney at The Guardian, who — perplexed by the film’s endless barrage of metaphysical questions — rated the film not with the standard stars, but with a row of question marks (Romney). The film garnered seven nominations at the 1999 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing for an Adapted Screenplay, and Best Cinematography (“The Thin Red Line — Awards”). It won none (“The Thin Red Line — Awards”). Malick did win the Golden Bear (the highest-possible award) at the Berlin International Film Festival; and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards gave John Toll the accolade for Best Cinematographer and Malick for Best Director (“The Thin Red Line — Awards”).

Conclusion

If the production of The Thin Red Line and the return of Malick to the big screen were heralded as a potential return to the New Hollywood style of filmmaking — an era of boundless creativity, novel storytelling, and innovative techniques pushed by auteurs — the reality turned out to be a convoluted, nuanced affair. The production, if anything, had the opposite effect; studios in the modern era have become risk-averse, more concerned about the financial bottom line and reluctant to take chances on auteurs. Line’s development illustrates the limitations of freedom that a studio permitted to a visionary, and how one’s megalomania and abrasive hubris attempted to break those barriers. Line is indicative of why studios do not regularly subscribe to the auteur theory; by closely evaluating of the entire trajectory of Line, it becomes clear that Malick and his experimental methods do not always succeed in the contemporary film industry.

]]>https://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/days-of-hell-terrence-malick-and-the-creation-of-the-thin-red-line/feed/0emersonmalone‘Inclusive Urbanism’ studies city designhttps://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2016/04/02/inclusive-urbanism-studies-city-design/
https://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2016/04/02/inclusive-urbanism-studies-city-design/#respondSat, 02 Apr 2016 19:19:07 +0000http://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/?p=594Read more ‘Inclusive Urbanism’ studies city design]]>The standard model for urban design and city growth, some A&AA professors argue, neglects a sizeable number of its residents.

Gentrification and makeovers within distressed neighborhoods can push out low-income communities by increasing property values; disabled, elderly, and handicapped populations are marginalized; and others, including children, are consistently sidelined, all in the name of progress that affects developing cities.

A city’s urban design can unintentionally lower living standards for certain residents and communities. Poorer populations often live in the more polluted parts of cities and in regions more prone to flooding, while affluent residents are likely to live upwind from smog and at elevations above flood line.

“The manner in which cities have grown during the Industrial Era and now in a time of globalization raises critical issues in terms of the relationship between social stratification and urban form,” says A&AA Interim Dean Brook Muller.

When three A&AA professors recognized that they all considered this issue from different, respective approaches, they collaborated in founding a new interdisciplinary course: AAA 321, “Inclusive Urbanism.”

The course aims to question the conventional city planning model and analyze how a new approach could be wide-ranging and hospitable to all residents, regardless of demographic.

Howard Davis, Department of Architecture professor; Gerardo Sandoval, Department of Planning, Public Policy, and Management assistant professor; and Muller are spearheading the course.

“The city works best when everyone—rich and poor, black and white, native and immigrant, etcetera—has a fair chance of taking advantage of its opportunities,” says Davis. “The physical form of the city plays a role in setting the stage for this.”

The four-credit course, initiated winter term 2016, is investigating the relationship between a city’s physical form and its effect on urban life for residents. The course will analyze this issue from a variety of angles (a building, neighborhood, district, and city) and from multiple planning perspectives (architecture, planning, public policy, landscape architecture, law, social science, and environmental studies) to recognize the best ways to promote social equity.

Often-overlooked populations include impoverished communities, ethnic minorities, children, and other vulnerable populations with little say in the overall scheme of city design and planning. The course will focus on how a city’s spatial patterns, power structures, and territoriality can exacerbate discrimination and impact urban dwellers’ economic and social potential.

The course’s syllabus states that “urban exclusion”—the indirect ostracism of certain populations—is a result of prejudice, intolerance, and discrimination that has had lasting effects on the way cities form, and where and how its residents reside.

Open to all UO majors, “Inclusive Urbanism” offers students from multiple disciplines the chance to learn together, gain exposure to alternative approaches to city planning, and develop newfound perspectives on urban design.

The class is intended to be a component of a new “Integrative Design and Creative Studies” undergraduate major, currently under development.

“We’re trying to capitalize on the strengths of the school and provide students who might not otherwise find an enabling path to enter our school,” says Muller. The new major will include “a core curriculum intended to expose students to the breadth of methodologies within the school,” he adds.

Davis’s expertise is in city development as it relates to citizens being empowered to actively participate in civic design. Muller’s expertise resides in ecological architecture and urban environmental justice, while Sandoval focuses intensively on minority communities.

“All of these things are related, and given the School of Architecture and Allied Arts’ focus on issues of social justice, the course seemed like a natural thing to develop,” says Davis.

Above: “I wouldn’t be a teacher if I weren’t optimistic about the future,” says architecture Professor Howard Davis (left) in the first week of the class. Photo by Emerson Malone.

A city ought to be developed from its “grassroots” rather than “top-down,” Davis notes. This parallels Sandoval’s emphasis on empowerment of communities of color and immigrants, whose populations tend to be disadvantaged in terms of decision-making. Muller’s expertise on environmental justice will tie these themes together.

Davis serves on the board of directors for the Collaborative for Inclusive Urbanism, an initiative comprised of architects and city planners. CIU has informed the course’s curriculum, including lending its name. Davis hopes students will offer ideas that will shape CIU’s ethos.

The course will introduce students to the fact that a city’s design invariably impacts its people and social groups, and that a one-size-fits-all approach can’t work, given the range of people affected.

Adds Muller, “One of our strengths in the school is dealing with social equity and environmental sustainability. That topic gets addressed in many different ways in many different disciplines.”

Sustainable architecture and green building technology is expensive and often unattainable for marginalized populations, Muller says, while sustainable design and energy-efficient buildings often support the affluent and neglect everyone else.

“In some ways—although certainly not in all instances —an architecture characterized as ‘green’ can end up perpetuating the very inequities that it ostensibly [addresses],” says Muller. “Could we be thinking about relatively robust, straightforward and inexpensive building systems and living landscape systems that benefit all people, not only the affluent?”

The course will feature guest and instructor lectures, as well as panel and class discussions. Among the guest speakers are Stephen Dueppen, UO assistant professor of anthropology, who will talk about the formative cities of Neolithic societies and how degrees of egalitarianism are reflected in the architecture and patterns of a city; and Anita M. Weiss, head of the Department of International Studies, who will speak about urban design patterns in cities such as Lahore, Pakistan, where architecture tends to encourage gender segregation that isolates women from the public and from open spaces.

]]>https://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2016/04/02/inclusive-urbanism-studies-city-design/feed/0emersonmaloneA&AA Interim Dean Brook Muller speaks during the Inclusive Urbanism class the first week of winter term."I wouldn't be a teacher if I weren't optimistic about the future," says architecture Professor Howard Davis (left) in the first week of the class.Adrenaline Film Projecthttps://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2016/03/23/adrenaline-film-project/
https://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2016/03/23/adrenaline-film-project/#respondWed, 23 Mar 2016 18:26:14 +0000http://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/?p=541Read more Adrenaline Film Project]]>This story was originally published on the School of Architecture & Allied Arts blog here. On this assignment from late April 2014, I followed groups of student filmmakers during an intensive 72-hour competition called Adrenaline Film Project.Click to view slideshow.

Whenever someone asked me what I was doing during the Adrenaline Film Project, I did not have a good answer. My assignment was to follow a student group and document their participation in the 72-hour competition in which each team writes, edits, and produces a short film in an assigned genre.

The competition is a component of the Cinema Pacific Film Festival, which is part of the University of Oregon Cinema Studies Program. UO graduate students from A&AA’s Arts and Administration Program administer Cinema Pacific.

This was my tangential reasoning as to what I was doing. But let me start by saying this: it’s not fair that I merely chronicled what happened. I didn’t suffer the toll that sleep deprivation took on the student groups’ collective mental state. I couldn’t do what they did. I value sleep too much. I’m irrationally jealous that my cat spends two-thirds of his life in slumber. I slept each night of the competition. Most of the competition’s participants cannot make that claim. That was the difference between us.

Each year, a different AAD graduate student manages the competition as the lead coordinator. This year, it was Laurette Garner’s job to secure fundraising, scheduling, and supervise every logistical aspect of AFP.

“I learned a ton. It’s super useful to watch and be a part of. I would love to work with festivals professionally in a managerial way, so it’s perfect for me, to see how a non-profit festival runs,” says Garner, who claims she probably slept approximately ten hours over the three-day run.

I shadowed two of the twelve teams. Each team was given two shared parameters for their film: a prop and a line of dialogue. The groups can incorporate both however they please as long as the dialogue is apparent and the prop is visible.

Since the Cinema Pacific Film Festival, which runs from April 23–27, hosts Adrenaline Film Project, the line of dialogue and prop originate from specific countries of origin. This year, Chile and Taiwan are the two countries in focus. The prop and line of dialogue will be revealed later.

In past competitions, sometimes a film centers on the prop entirely, while at other times it’s more understated. Horror films have used it as an instrument of coup de grâce. While one group could take the prop and line of dialogue toward a comedic route, another may write a drama.

Larissa Ennis, operations manager for the festival, says “It’s really kind of a Hollywood boot camp, if you will, how to make a creative project under pressure and on a really tight deadline.”

The secondary effect of AFP is that between the sleep deficit and the time pressure, people lose their marbles. Delirium takes time to set in. It can take a matter of hours to days. I documented its stages in a handful of film auteurs who underwent all the stages and consequences of sleep deprivation over three days.

The Adrenaline Film Project commenced at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, April 23.

WEDNESDAY

4:51 p.m. I arrive at the Downtown Baker Center, at East 10th Avenue and High Street in Eugene. Both the Alaska and Mexico Conference Rooms have been opened up for the Adrenaline Film Project participants. I’m handed a press pass with my name on it.

Twelve teams of three to four members sit at the tables. Before every person is a red folder, inside of which are a number of forms and agreement licenses necessary to properly (and legally) film a movie.

Leigh Kilton-Smith, professional acting coach and one of the competition’s mentors, addresses the room.

“I’m the actor’s advocate. If you’re shooting a delicate scene, and your actor’s not living up to the hype, call me. I’ll come, but you need to be there,” she says. “Use me. Use me like crazy. Use me like toilet paper…no, that’s not right.”

Jeff Wadlow is another one of this year’s mentors. He directed 2008’s “Never Back Down,” in which a rebellious teenager is lured into an underground fight club. More recently, Jeff wrote and directed “Kick-Ass 2” and penned two episodes of A&E’s “Bates Motel.”

Jeff co-founded AFP for the Virginia Film Festival in 2004. This is the competition’s fifth annual manifestation in Eugene.

He details the physical toll that AFP can take on its participants, but notes that the only physical injury in AFP’s history was when someone cut his hand on a sword. He was potentially sleep-deprived or over-caffeinated or both. We don’t know the details. We know for sure that stiches were involved. And Jeff wants all of us to stay safe.

Omar Naim is the third mentor, and it’s his third time helping with AFP. He wrote and directed the Robin Williams drama “The Final Cut.”

“When you’re watching a movie, dialogue shouldn’t be the most visible part of screenwriting,” he tells the crowded conference room. “You should think about writing situations. It took me years after film school to learn this.”

Jeff explains that in the past fourteen AFPs, a film has never gone unfinished. Although, there was one isolated incident when one person was so dissatisfied with their work that she took all the footage and fled town.

Jeff likens the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” to AFP: your very first, impulsive ideas may be the wisest decision; our ability to assess what is important about a situation can be collected from a very narrow period of experience. Spontaneous choices are often just as good as – or even better than – carefully planned and considered ones.

“We will not let you fail,” he declares. “Failure is not an option. … You have 51 weekends of the year to make whatever movie you want. This weekend, we’re asking you to work with us.”

5:11 p.m. Before they’re allowed to leave the Downtown Baker Center, the AFP participants need their film to be green-lit. They pitch their five-minute film to the three mentors, including its setting, their character, why one would care, as well as the beginning, middle, end, and button of their story. (The “button” is the nifty way in which a story or scene ends.)

It’s just past 5 p.m. In 17 hours, everyone needs to have the first draft of the script completed and approved. No one has started yet because the line of dialogue and prop have not yet been assigned.

5:35 p.m. Jeff talks about how Robert Rodriguez sold his blood to finance his film “El Mariachi.” Rodriguez also used a school bus in the movie, just because he had access to one. The lesson: if you have access to something cool, use it. If your actress knows mixed martial arts, put her in a fight scene.

Some ground rules are established, including: Make the film more than 20 miles outside of Eugene’s city limits. Oakridge is off-limits.

5:42 p.m. “A bunch of strangers are going to the movies on Saturday night, and we’re responsible for their entertainment,” Omar says.

At 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, all these student-produced films will be presented for a final screening in Prince Lucien Campbell Hall.

Jeff remarks: “I will not let you be a parody of your genre. It has to be authentic. You can have self-awareness, but be truthful.”

The mentors advise the noir group: “Don’t use fedoras.”

6:07 p.m. (70 hours and 53 minutes until final cut is due)

The line of dialogue and prop are assigned.

The piece of dialogue is a Chilean phrase, which means, “You think you’re a badass?” but literally translates to, “You think you’re death?”

The prop is Taiwanese by way of Bed, Bath, & Beyond; 12 red teapots are passed around.

“If you break it, you better write it into your story, or glue it back together. You could try to buy a new one,” says Larissa Ennis, operations manager for the Cinema Pacific Film Festival, “but they’re from Bed, Bath & Beyond, and we bought out all the ones in the tri-state area.” (Ennis also works as program manager for Academic Extension at UO.)

I’m assigned to shadow a group whose genre is dark comedy. Upon receiving the assignment, they are ecstatic. Jeff shouts to them from across the room that incest and killing people is fair game. The Alaska Conference Room gets very quiet.

Their names are Will Cuddy, Zach Feiner, and Tommy Pittenger. The former two are advertising majors at UO, and Tommy is a journalism major.

The conversation begins on a simple idea: what makes a comedy “dark” is the ironic understatement of a heavy matter. Case in point, this dark comedy will be about killing someone, but it will be in a very nonchalant manner. It’s established that dark comedies aren’t about the murder, but the banality of it.

This is not Will’s first year doing AFP. Last year, he directed the largely improvised comedy “Family Dinner,” about a brother and sister who are each trying to come out to their parents during a dinner. The movie received both the Kalb Jury Award and The Audience Award from the Saturday night screening –two of the four possible awards.

As the crew sits and talks, other elements of the film are discovered, piece by piece. These include: a man stumbles out drunk from the bar, but he’s only pretending to be intoxicated. A woman takes him home. He disappears, only to come back and throw a plastic bag over a girl’s head. He breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the camera.

6:30 p.m. (70 hours, 30 minutes until final cut is due) Will, Tommy, and Zach are the first group to pitch their idea. They have been marinating the idea for about 25 minutes. Truthfully, they hardly have the structure for a short film. They have some semblance of what a situation should be, but nothing to hold it together.

They walk into a room where Omar, Jeff, and Leigh sit behind a long table. Will speaks first.

He tells them about the opening of the film – how a man stumbles drunk out of a bar, how a woman takes him home. She makes tea for him, but the man disappears. She wanders around her house and searches for the drunk, only to end up suffocating inside a plastic bag.

Leigh: “I get the darkness of it, but I don’t get the comedy.”

Jeff proposes allowing the girl to be the one stumbling drunk. She appears to be a more vulnerable character, and almost immediately, the audience is invested.

Jeff: “Guys killing women is just kinda icky. We’ve been there and you’re not going to get any laughs out of it.”

Omar: “If everyone turns out to be deceptive and a liar, it’s great because it’s a black comedy because their motives are really bad. Their motives don’t have to go as far as murder. Their motives can be deceptive.

Jeff: “I do like the idea of people who are trying to deceive each other at the same time, but we’d have to figure out a way to not let the characters know until the end.“

Omar: “That’s great, like a battle of duplicity. One of them goes to make tea, and we realize that character’s up to something. Together, they’re both trying to kill each other. The audience knows they’re both bad people. They deserve each other. ‘They deserve each other’ is the hallmark of the dark comedy.”

6:45 p.m. (70 hours and 15 minutes until final cut is due)

Will, Tommy, and Zach come back to the table to reconvene. Four coupons for free Dutch Bros. coffee have materialized on the table.

They discuss the two characters who are playing cat-and-mouse with each other. One has a knife in his pants, and the pants are thrown across the room.

“What’s their motive?” I ask. “Why are they trying to kill each other?”

“They’re serial killers,” Tommy shrugs. “It’s a deeply rooted urge.”

Ideas are crumpled up, thrown out, brought back out of the discarded pile and revived. Nothing is written down.

7:29 p.m. (69 hours and 31 minutes until final cut is due)

I suggest the man and woman try to kill one another, but end up murdering a pizza guy. The movie ends with the man and woman sitting on the floor and eating pizza, surrounded by the pizza guy’s blood and viscera. They discuss their murderous exploits and finish each others’ sentences, except with really grotesque phrases.

My suggestions are rightfully ignored.

7:54 p.m. (69 hours and 6 minutes until final cut is due)

There’s a general agreement that the pizza guy character is overdone and cliché. He’s out of the movie.

8:00 p.m. (69 hours until final cut is due)

They decide it’ll take a very talented actress. Will calls the group’s mutual friend in Portland to see if she wants to play the role of “Female Protagonist Serial Killer.” He eases into the request. First, he asks, so, how was Coachella?

Tommy spills that he dated this girl in 5th grade. She has bipolar disorder, and may be able to play crazy well on camera. There is a brief discussion as to whether this would be an advantage or a setback.

Will comes back. No dice on the girl. She’s in California and won’t be available in time. It’s time to find a new damsel of distress.

8:07 p.m. (68 hours and 53 minutes until final cut is due)

Will tosses the mesh component to the kettle up and down. He details his vision for the film’s killing montage: the woman, at a coffee shop, is nonchalantly explaining how many men she’s killed. She shoves a man’s face into the toilet. There’s a GoPro in the toilet. We see a close-up of a man’s face drowning. She pulls his head back out, and back in, but it’s a new guy. The montage continues with different men being shoved into the toilet.

I point to the red kettle. “She should waterboard someone with tea,” I suggest.

8:15 p.m. (68 hours and 45 minutes until final cut is due)

Everyone gathers around Tommy’s phone to watch a video of Sarah – a new actress – modeling for a yoga or outdoor business advertisement. Tommy is noticeably reluctant when I ask for particulars on the video. Details are vague because of a nondisclosure agreement.

The second pitch meeting is pushed so everyone can go hang out with Sarah and get to know her. There remains little to no story. Building rapport is essential for movie making. They leave the Baker Downtown Center at a quarter after 8.

8:31 p.m. (68 hours and 29 minutes until final cut is due)

I pack up and leave after the group decides to go meet Sarah to determine whether she’s serial killer material. A sign is taped on the exit door:

THIS DOOR LOCKS AUTOMATICALLY AT FIVE P.M.

USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM TO GET BACK IN.

A Cinema Pacific flyer is jammed in the doorway to prevent the bolt from fully locking. I carefully picked it up so I could get out. Outside, it’s raining. It’s 49 degrees. Three men and a woman stand around while one rambles about his vision for an idea.

I shut the door, but the flyer is a good three inches above the bolt lock. The others stop talking and stare at me. I try opening the door again, but it doesn’t budge. All at once, we realize I’ve locked them all outside. We didn’t use the buddy system.

THURSDAY

2:08 p.m. (50 hours and 52 minutes until final cut is due)

I text Zach, who tells me they won’t be filming until 8 p.m. tonight. The AFP schedule says a writing workshop is in progress in McKenzie Hall. I make my way down to the first floor and recognize a boy and two girls sitting on the ground against the wall. They look too young to be university students. The boy is looking at his laptop, open on the floor. He introduces himself as Alan.

This group is from the Academy of Arts and Academics (A3) in Springfield. They are the only high school group participating in AFP.

Alan tells me he went to sleep around 2:30 in the morning and woke up four hours later. This goes for all three of them. They blame coffee.

Another girl, Meka, 17, wears a beanie over her red hair. Her pea coat has pins of Dead Kennedys and The Cramps on the lapel. She makes edits to the shot list.

She has a labret piercing, along with two other piercings on either side of it. Alan got his septum pierced back in January as a birthday present to himself. They all have non-uniform haircuts. Art school is easygoing on the dress code.

The final draft of their script had to be approved by 10 a.m. this morning. Cassandra is 15. She has blue hair. She tells me the process for the script re-writes is as follows:

This team is making a psychological thriller, and they’re having trouble securing their drunks. This is a problem because their movie has two drunken characters.

Meka and Alan, both juniors at A3, look at their actor database. Among their choices are 28 females, 22 males, 4 children, and a list of specialty actors, with talents like violin or mixed martial arts.

“We can’t use Dash,” Alan sighs. “He’s kind of a last resort. He’s too much of a baby. He’s not really a drunk.”

Meka accidentally kicks over her Fiji bottle.

Cass tells me, “You look like Spiderman.”

“You mean Peter Parker?” I ask.

She gives me a look that says, Point taken, nerd.

She pulls out a pouch of mashed fruit and hands one to me. It’s labeled “banana and multifruit.” She says they went to Albertson’s last night and raided the aisles for fuel. I ask them if they really plan to make a movie subsisting off baby food.

“I have this caffeine headache, but it’s my friend,” Alan says.

2:43 p.m. (50 hours and 17 minutes until final cut is due)

Cass says there are going to be free doughnuts where they’re going.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” I ask.

“I didn’t want you to come under false pretenses,” she says.

I leave McKenzie Hall with the high school crew. I didn’t have to persuade them whatsoever. The press pass speaks volumes.

3:20 p.m. (49 hours and 40 minutes until final cut is due)

It’s half past three and there are three high school students in Max’s Tavern. This might otherwise be a troubling scene, but their main actress owns the bar. The air smells like popcorn.

Cass introduces me to an actor. This is Drunk #1.

“We’re trying to get in touch with a boy’s mother,” Cass tells me. “We need a little boy actor. He’s going to walk in on his mother having just killed someone.”

Alan sits down and tells me it’s too loud to film here, so we’re going to Bren’s house. Bren is their teacher from A3. We leave before happy hour.

In the back parking lot of Max’s, Bren asks the others, “Do you need blood? Should I get some blood? I’m going to get some blood.”

Bren tells Cass and I, “The front seat is too packed. You guys have to sit in the back.”

She drives a truck without a backseat. We pile into her truck bed and crouch as Bren barrels down the road. Cass and I are human cargo en route to her teacher’s apartment.

Cass tells me part of the A3 campus used to be strip club. “The sign’s still out back. That’s how I know.”

She points to a box of crullers from Albertson’s. It vibrates and slides on the truck bed.

“There are the free doughnuts,” she says.

4:22 p.m. (48 hours and 38 minutes until final cut is due)

Bren drops us off at her home somewhere on Lincoln Street.

African masks hang above a window in the living room. Professional feminist photographs are framed on the adjacent wall. Her shelves are lined with several CDs, like Joni Mitchell, Sheryl Crow, Chopin, and books, like “The Idiot’s Guide to Zen Buddhism” and assorted high school literature. On the mantle, a clock ticks exceptionally loud and dings every half hour. It runs fourteen minutes fast. A quivering dachshund named Olive periodically stands on her hind legs as we bring in tripods, cameras, a light box, and other professional lighting equipment owned by the school.

Bren comes back from Hirons with an IV blood bag, blood capsules in pill form, and red face paint.

The child actor, named Orien, arrives. Leigh, the mentor and acting coach, arrives later. She kneels by him while he sits at the dining room table. His hands hold up his cheeks. Both elbows are on the table. They read the script and run lines together.

“So it’s a simple little scene, but what’s it about?” Leigh asks him. “The whole movie’s about the relationship with her son. If we don’t like her in this scene, we won’t care about her at all. So you and your mother are very close. We’re going to bring that same kind of energy to this relationship.”

Orien sighs. “I like comedy.”

“Yeah, I know,” Leigh tells him. “Comedy’s a little easier for you, but this is easy, too because you can put some comedy in there. Let’s find out where, okay?”

5:06 p.m. (47 hours and 54 minutes until final cut is due)

In the first scene, the child is late for school. He sits on the floor and feeds treats to Olive, who, on cue, stands on her hind legs. The boy’s mother packs his backpack and he races out the front door, neglecting to reciprocate his mother’s “I love you!”

This is the opening shot. After a number of takes, the camera moves in tighter for a new angle.

Orien takes a union break in the back porch where he reads the Hardy Boys. The book wasn’t just a prop, he tells me. He really likes the Hardy Boys.

I recommend The Boxcar Children and Goosebumps. He says he’s read part of one of Goosebumps books, and it wasn’t all that scary. Orien is 9.

6:02 p.m. (46 hours and 58 minutes until final cut is due)

Minutes after Orien leaves for soccer practice, the actor who plays the landlord arrives.

Cass instructed him to dress trashy. He wears a wife beater and an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. He has a ponytail and a scruffy black beard. He plays the single mother’s landlord in the film. He’s about to be smacked in the head with a teakettle and bleed onto the floor.

His name is Jackson, and he is a stuntman.

8:09 p.m. (44 hours and 51 minutes until the final cut is due)

After I leave the psychological thriller set, I can’t get in touch with Zach to find out where they’re shooting. I call Larissa to retrieve Laurette’s phone number to retrieve Will’s phone number.

8:44 p.m. (44 hours and 16 minutes until final cut is due)

They’re about a block and a half away from my house. On the walk over, a car stops at an intersection and a man and woman stumble out. They don’t stop giggling and joking about being a couple.

“We should walk together like we’re dating,” she says.

“But aren’t we dating?”

“Yeah, right,” she laughs. “That’d be rad.”

I don’t realize it at the time, but these two are actors in the film.

It’s immediately evident when I enter the house that the dark comedy has evolved immensely since I left last night. Some things remain the same. The protagonists are still serial killers.

In the doorway, the woman – her name’s Ally – asks me, “Do I die tonight?”

Campbell, the man she came with, boasts in the living room about how stellar his performance will be tonight. He declares, “If I have any demand tonight, it would be for everyone to act well – because I want this thing to be the bomb.”

Tonight’s first scene is the opening of the movie. The premise is simple: two serial killers are on a double date with another, non-psychopathic couple (played by Ally and Campbell).

The movie begins with a laugh. The trouble is getting all the actors to begin laughing without it sounding forced. Zach improvises to get everyone to laugh so the dialogue can begin, but Campbell keeps interjecting and ruining the take. Campbell has no dialogue. He is just supposed to sit and be silent.

Take one:

“Well,” Zach starts, “I’m going to stab you in the back of the neck later so that you’re easily incapacitated–”

“Cerebellum,” Campbell nods. “I get that.”

Take two:

“So, Campbell, I’d say later, you and I go on a date,” Zach says.

“I don’t– I don’t know what to say!” remarks Campbell, flabbergasted. He fans his hands around. “Yes. Yes! Of course!”

Take four:

“What’s brown and sticky?” Zach asks.

“What?”

“A stick.”

No laughs.

Take seven:

Sarah tries her hand at it.

“What do you call a fish that won’t share its treasure?”

“What?” Ally asks.

“A little shellfish.”

Silence.

Take ten:

“What’s a pirate’s favorite letter?” Zach asks.

Sarah guesses, “Arrrr?”

“Actually, it’s the C.”

Tumbleweeds pass by.

Will, balancing the boom mic over his shoulders, asks Sarah, “Do you have any more shellfish jokes?”

9:50 p.m. (43 hours and 10 minutes until final cut is due)

They film the final scene immediately after the first. Campbell and Ally are in the frame, while Zach and Sarah elaborate their villainous, murderous exploits. Zach tells them how they’re going to die tonight. He improvises different methods of his plans to kill and torture them both. Campbell and Ally sit there, bewildered.

Take five:

“This is a dark comedy,” Will says, “so you guys should be more…”

He trails off. Fragmented thinking is another symptom of sleep deprivation. It becomes increasingly difficult to articulate your thoughts.

“Less pensive?” Campbell asks.

“Well, you’re not modeling.”

Pretty soon they change the angle and close the French doors. Make-up girl and I listen from the living room.

10:17 p.m. (42 hours and 43 minutes until final cut is due)

Will busts through the French doors. “That’s a wrap on guests A & B!”

Campbell spills out behind him. “I was definitely guest B. With a capital B.” He wanders over to the box of Goldfish crackers on the coffee table. He says if he were Spiderman, he would have just slingshot some web to fetch it from across the room. His tone becomes grave all of a sudden.

“They hate me in there. I kept messing up on every take.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “At least you didn’t have any lines.”

“But I kept trying to interject with one-liners, and they didn’t want that.”

I ask him at what point today he realized he was going to be in a movie. He was at his fraternity house earlier this afternoon when Ally called him. His beerconfident soul immediately agreed to be in the movie.

He looks back at the closed set of double doors and laments, “I feel like I should say sorry.”

My next twenty minutes is spent in the living room with make-up girl. We hear them do takes, and double takes, and triple takes. We hear the same voices recite the same lines in slightly different inflections.

“As it turns out, we had a lot in common.”

“As it turns out, we had a lot in common.”

“I’d kill for her.”

“I’d kill for her.”

Two housecats meander around. The sizeable tabby sashays toward the French doors. This is Gus. He knows on the other side of the doors is his food bowl, but he isn’t allowed on the closed set.

“When I took a nap earlier, and I got under the covers, I could feel how clammy and gnarly my body was,” he says.

Will says he’s gotten an hour and a half total since last night. Tommy says he slept for about an hour.

Sarah comes back out to the living room with a ceramic bowl of fake blood. It took her about two minutes flat to concoct this.

11:07 p.m. (41 hours and 53 minutes until final cut is due)

Everyone prepares for the murder montage and talks over one another.

“I’m getting stabbed, right?”

“I think you’re getting choked.”

“No, wait, I’m getting drowned in the bathtub.”

“That’s not that hard. Just a lot of flailing and splashing.”

“Emerson, we’re choking you, bud.”

“No, I say we drown Emerson and choke Joe.”

“Are you getting choked?”

“I think I’m getting stabbed in the face through a pillow. My neck’s pretty messed up, so I can’t do anything else.”

Someone walks through the room with a pillow.

“Is that the stabbing pillow?”

“Yep.”

Zach runs into the room.

Sarah turns to me and asks, “Are you ready to die?”

Zach asks, “How long can you hold your breath?”

I’m going to be a star.

FRIDAY

12:51 a.m. (40 hours and 9 minutes until final cut is due)

I’ve just spent the last hour bent over Sarah’s tub while she holds my scalp and shoves my head underwater. My job, while being drowned, is to convulse and splash and kick my legs as much as possible.

I only know a little context of the scene. It’s during a killing montage, and I’m one of the victims. I drown in the bathtub. The tap runs during every take. We wanted the bathtub to overflow, but the drain impedes that.

This shot is going to be in slow motion, they tell me, so the more I shake, the cooler it’ll look.

This shot stars with Zach. He carries the red teakettle from the kitchen and into the bathroom. I’m splashing and flailing. He hands Sarah a cup of tea. She smiles. Between them, my still, lifeless body leans over the tub, my head submerged.

On the first take, Sarah accidentally smacked my chin into the porcelain, and immediately apologized. My leg kicks weren’t enthusiastic enough, so we had to do several takes. I forgot to mention: I’d been stripped down to my drawers and my socks.

Between takes, Sarah straddles the side of the tub. Will is in the hallway about to give us a cue.

Sarah tightens her grip on my hair. I plunge into the tub. I do my best tremors. My legs splay around. I repeatedly kick the sink and smack the water.

At the end of each take, we replay each take in the hallway. I am dripping wet. My kicks look comical and fake, like I was in the middle of ballet practice.

I was instructed: “Big kicks, Emerson. Big kicks.”

Whenever I come up from the water, Sarah throws a towel on my waterlogged head. With repeated takes, the towel becomes damper. Eventually the hot water runs out. The bathtub fills with cold water. I am so desensitized from the scene’s violence that my first question when I come up is, “Is your water heater even turned on?”

Before another take, we are in position. She sits on the side of the tub, one leg in. I lean my chest over the tub, ready to fall in.

“What happened to your eye?” Sarah asked me.

“I passed out around 1 a.m. Easter morning,” I tell her. “I hit my head on a granite counter.”

“How many stitches did you get?”

I hold up three fingers.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. The bathwater is an inch from my face. It has stray hairs and pieces of lint floating in it. “It’s just been a weird week.”

And a moment later, she dunks me, and I thrash around like a maniac. This is the ninth take.

Zach asks me, “Did you know there was prize money involved?”

I shake my head. My ears are full of water.

“If we get it, I’ll give you $25.”

I use Sarah’s hair dryer. I look in the mirror and notice another stitch in my eyebrow is loose.

Tommy is baffled. “You hit your head and got stitches?” he bellows. “And you still let us drown you?! What a trooper!”

1:26 a.m. (39 hours and 34 minutes until the final cut is due)

Zach is shirtless and in Sarah’s bed. He has the Steve Jobs biography open in his lap. He’s personally inserted his own page. It’s a new chapter, titled “You Think You’re Death.” The content for the chapter beneath it is what he found when he Googled “stories about birds.”

In this scene, Sarah strides in and strangles Will with an iPhone cord. She has it around his neck in a U-shape as she pulls on it from behind him. I suggest it would look better if the cord were wound around his neck twice. Everyone is generally appalled by that idea.

She stands over Will. He’s on his knees and claws at his own neck as he asphyxiated.

So Will and Sarah trade places. Will shows her the proper way to choke someone is to cross the cord and pull it sideways. There’s more resistance that way.

2:22 a.m. (38 hours and 38 minutes until the final cut is due)

Sarah, Will, Zach, and Tommy leave the house and go to Max’s Tavern, where they’re filming from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. I call it quits and walk home.

1:23 p.m. (27 hours and 37 minutes until the final cut is due)

The following afternoon, I’m biking along 13th Avenue into campus when I spot some pedestrians who don’t belong. Cass, Meka, and Alan are walking toward the EMU for food. I advise them to go elsewhere. We end up at Pegasus Pizza and we order a giant cheese pizza.

The three of them ask me if I heard that one of the AFP groups got into a fistfight over fake tears.

They had a relatively early night. They went to sleep around 11:30 p.m. We compare medical stories. Meka walks us through the “six or seven” times she’s chipped her front teeth. Alan folds a paper napkin and tears it down the middle to illustrate what happened to his bottom lip. Cass once lost a toenail.

I step into the restroom. Outside, the three of them convene and ask each other if it’s possible that I’ve been hired by Cinema Pacific to implant tracking chips into their skin while they’re dog-tired and defenseless.

2:35 p.m. (26 hours and 25 minutes until the final cut is due)

We go to the Cinema Studies lab. They receive sporadic help from Frank, whose job is to go around and assist everyone with video-editing programs like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere.

2:53 p.m. (26 hours and 7 minutes until the final cut is due)

Meka gives us butterscotch. She shows me a notebook she’s filled with a long list of movies that she plans to see, including Martin Scorsese’s “85 Films You Need To See Before You Know Anything About Film.”

Alan tells me that the entire shoot last evening with Jackson felt like a dream-like fugue state. He also describes everything as “feathery.” Not in an aesthetic, or textural way, he explains; everything just resembles feathers. Meka nods. She knows exactly what he means.

7:19 p.m. (21 hours and 41 minutes until the final cut is due)

Alan, Cass, and Meka watch all the takes to mark what shots work and what doesn’t. The next deadline is to have a rough cut of the film (without music or adjusted audio) by 10 a.m. tomorrow morning.

7:47 p.m. (21 hours and 13 minutes until the final cut is due)

Meka’s notebook has a page labeled “FILMMAKING TIPS.” It includes a long list of things to take into account, including a quote from Scorsese: “Every film should look the way I feel.”

Alan returns from the refreshment table with a can of Sprite.

“There was a plaque over there with the names of past winners written on it,” he tells us. “So…we need to win because I want my name on a plaque.”

I need to take a break. Video editing is not a spectator sport.

11:26 p.m. (17 hours and 34 minutes until the final cut is due)

I come back to the Cinema Studies Lab. Mostly everyone sits behind computers. One of the heist team guys brought in a dual monitor. I read the heist film’s script. A man is robbed of a special type of tea called “Tibetan Sweet Leaf” by a hippie. He calls up his friends to break into the hippie’s house and steal the tea. His friends have special monikers like “The Toolbox” and “The Muscle.”

Jacob asks me for a name to replace their working title, which is “Teabaggers.” It was formerly titled “Three Old Men Have a Good Time.”

SATURDAY

1:22 a.m. (15 hours and 38 minutes until the final cut is due)

Everyone in the Cinema Studies Lab is sprinting toward a finished product with reckless abandon. Somewhere, someone coughs. The room’s volume fluctuates every few moments from tremendously loud to a silent hush. The choppy buzz of manipulated audio from a Final Cut project keeps playing. Cheetos, Red Vines, and the two iceboxes full of sodas and string cheese are the primary forms of sustenance. Everyone is wide-eyed, at varying levels of alertness.

Alan tells me he teaches a class at A3 on robotics and electronics. I am jealous of a 16-year-old.

Cass, Alan, and Meka all go outside for some fresh air. When Cass comes back, she tells me, “I just realized I’ll probably never get the chance to see this library completely empty ever again, so I started walking down an aisle, and I thought someone was watching me, so I started walking back. But then I felt like someone was following me, so I started walking faster and then I ran into a door.”

Sleep deprivation can invoke unexpected psychiatric consequences. Paranoia and hallucinations are some of the more common side effects.

3:09 a.m. (13 hours and 51 minutes until final cut is due)

Cass and I walk a mile and a half to Dutch Bros. for caffeine at Alan and Meka’s behest, and back again. Zach and Tommy berate me for not bringing them coffee. They remark that they should have drowned me for real. People are getting cranky.

5:11 a.m. (11 hours and 49 minutes until final cut is due)

Things have quieted down. Everyone speaks in monotone. The weak have either gone home or fallen asleep on the couches. Water bottles, open chip bags, and cans of stale soda occupy every available counter space.

The rough cut of the film is due in fewer than five hours. Meka says the film’s about 13 minutes long now. She quotes Kevin Smith, who said something to the effect of a film being your baby that you nurture. If you have a great shot but it doesn’t fit with the pacing, you have to “kill your baby.”

“Right now we’re trying to kill the baby, but make it as presentable as possible for later,” Alan says.

Someone from the magical realism film wakes up from the couch, walks over to us, and says, “Mmm! Smells like filmmakers.”

6:19 a.m. (10 hours and 41 minutes until final cut is due)

When I leave the library, the sun is out. The birds chirp loudly. It’s a new day already.

1:36 p.m. (3 hours and 24 minutes until final cut is due)

There’s not a more helpless and depraved sight than a room of twenty-somethings scraping the depths of a video-editing binge. While everyone is working on their own unique project, they could shoot a horror film in the Cinema Studies lab. There are an abundance of slack-jawed, free-roaming zombies.

Meka sits before the screen. She slowly turns when I sit beside her. Her vocabulary has degenerated into mumbling.

“What have you been doing, besides this?” I ask.

She looks away for a second. “…this.”

Alan shows up. His cheeks are flushed. He tells me he’s gotten a combined total of thirty minutes of sleep since 5 a.m.

“How are the good times, Alan?” I ask. “Letting them roll?”

“I keep forgetting that I’m awake.”

In the dark comedy corner, Tommy’s eyes are glazed over. His blinks are much slower. He asks me for a title. The film is 3 ½ minutes long.

3:38 p.m. (1 hour and 22 minutes until final cut is due)

Leigh has announced that the goal is for everyone to finalize the film and export it by 4 p.m. today, if possible. Jeff and Omar tell everyone that each film needs music and a title card that acknowledges Cinema Pacific.

Kevin comes around and asks for everyone’s titles. He approaches the psycho-thriller group to pose the question, “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

Their title is “Bottom Line.”

The dark comedy is named “Two.”

3:58 p.m. (1 hour and 2 minutes until final cut is due)

The workplace comedy team finishes their first export of the day. They leave with laptop and MIDI keyboard in hand. Their exit is countered with boos and applause.

4:04 p.m. (56 minutes until final cut is due)

Jeff suggests to Tommy and Zach to change the title to “Kill for Her.”

Zach says he’s gotten 12 hours of sleep in the past 72 hours. “That’s not a good ratio,” he mopes.

4:43 p.m. (17 minutes until final cut is due)

Headphone splitters are disregarded. Mostly everyone watches their final film in full through the computer’s speakers and the sounds of every movie are merging over one another. It’s deafeningly loud. Somewhere in the Cinema Studies lab, a jumbo jet takes off. An alarm clock beeps. A tattoo gun buzzes. A woman screams bloody murder and a teakettle shrieks. Time is tight.

4:53 p.m. (7 minutes until final cut is due)

Meka and Alan spend the last minutes scrambling to locate the last names of the actors to enter into the credits. “Bottom Line” is nearly finished.

Bren tells me that “about half” of the students at A3 have “some form of autism.”

Omar visits the “Kill for Her” work in progress and suggests that they add jazz music over the dinner scenes.

“It might be too late for that,” they tell him.

“I don’t know,” Omar says. “Your first impression is everything.”

Jeff comes to the group to tell them they need some sound in the scene. Even room tone. “It’s not going to work,” he says. “You need ambient tone, or room tone, or some innocuous music, or else it’s not going to work.”

He scratches his head as they dispute back and forth about how to fill the empty space. Use the music over the end credits. Use the audio from Campbell’s stupid joke about “The Bachelor.” Really, any form of sound would work.

4:59 p.m. (1 minute until final cut is due)

Somewhere Leigh spells her hyphenated last name for someone.

Jeff insists they need music in this scene.

Will runs a hand through his hair and SCREAMS: “I don’t know what to do!”

5:06 p.m.

Jeff returns and says, “I have an unhealthy investment in this movie right now. Did you get audio or not?”

5:10 p.m.

“Bottom Line” is finalized and exported. “Kill For Her” is receiving one last overview.

I ask Kevin, “Did you sleep?”

“Yeah,” he nods. “Well, on Thursday.”

It’s been a long 72 hours.

9:30 p.m. – The screening

The official screening of all the films has come to a close. The long, arduous effort of these rivals, three days a slave to the competition, is about to be showcased to the crowded auditorium.

It begins with the heist film by Jacob Salzberg, Noah Phillips-Edwards and Derek Brown, now titled “Taking Tibet.”

This is followed with the romantic comedy. A woman pines for the right boyfriend, one who’s sensitive and appreciates the little things in life. So she goes to the cemetery to court and spark a widower. This film, created by Melissa Seda, Maura Turner, and Kory Kast, is titled “Mourning Person.”

The sci-fi film “Ebb & Flo,” the product of Sam Hayward, Henry Huntington, and Robert Chacon, stars two young redheads as sisters who emerged somewhere by the river and follow a man home. The subtle details add an elusive air to the movie. When the twins appear in his front yard, the front door’s window works like a kaleidoscope, and it briefly looks like there are multiple twins.

Fourth is “Bottom Line,” in which the single mother and bartender, played by Kim Fairbain, barely scrapes by to pay her rent and her molesting landlord comes in to torment her, physically and psychologically.

The group drew inspiration from “Kill Bill” to split the screen into two to show action going on in tandem. It conveys a starkly claustrophobic feeling when the landlord brushes Kim’s arm and runs a hand through her hair.

“Get Your Fill,” the revenge film produced by Talon Shever, Elijah Sprints, and Colin Zeal, follows. A man and woman break into a house to kidnap a character named Phil. (Factoid about this movie: a convenience store served as the original filming location. Big signs out front read: “Filming in Progress” with the phrase “fake guns” underlined in red. When Jeff arrived on set, he noticed the police cars and had inferred that the group had officers as actors. In truth, someone, upon seeing a convenience store being robbed, had called the cops.)

The noir “Burn Card” uses the supplied quote as one of the few very lines of dialogue in this sparse film. A man walks into a tattoo parlor to get the tarot card of death tattooed on his neck. The artist asks him, “You think you’re death?” Dale Vowels, Charles J. Griffin, and Jeremy Bronson used a number of noir motifs, from double-crossing to silhouettes to craft the story.

The magical realism film “Bottled Up” shows a man, stuck in the routine malaise of his crude coworkers and exploitative neighbors. The red teakettle appears on the man’s front porch and is smashed into a hundred pieces before a schlubby genie grants him the confidence he desires. Ty Eckmeyer, Mia Schaffler, and Davis Burns were behind this movie.

“Flickers” centers on a movie theater employee, both concession worker and projectionist. He finds a reel strip in which an enigmatic figure appears. He wanders into the empty theater auditorium and is stalked by the shadowy figure. During the screening, Jake Valdez, Jonathan Klimoski, and Joshua Purvis earned some gratifying gasps and screams for this horror film.

Haley Morris, Celia Zechmann, and Claire Chong created “2%,” a coming-of-age film about a woman who finds moral support in the form of a stranger with weighty advice in the milk aisle.

With B-Movie “Rat King,” Monica DeLeon, Blaine Bailey, and Sierra Swan deliberately steer into the skid with their genre. A woman calls an exterminator to eradicate the rodents in her closet, only to fall in love with a man-sized rat in her basement.

“Kill For Her,” previously named “Two,” plays. A double date turns sour as one couple realizes their counterparts are bloodthirsty sadists.

Workplace comedy “Nowhere News” closes out the night. Shawn Kim, Pete Wells, and Will Snyder crafted a story about two news anchors and an airheaded cameraman who try to get laid off when they realize they can be rewarded with unemployment wages.

After a brief intermission as films from past years were shown, awards were handed out.

“Taking Tibet” won the 2014 Ben Kalb Jury award, with “Bottled Up” as the runner-up.

The best actor award, a trophy that featured the red teakettle with a gold-painted lid, went to Kim Fairbain for “Bottom Line.”

The psychological thriller also received the honorable mention for the Mentor’s Award. Jeff explained: “Making a film is hard, but it’s even harder when you can’t drive.”

The Mentor’s Award went to “Get Your Fill.”

After viewers had cast their ballots, “Kill For Her” took home the night’s Audience Award, while the honorable mention went to “Rat King.”

I would personally grant awards to “Bottled Up” for best use of the teakettle, and “Nowhere News” for best use of “You think you’re death?”

The news crew assembled in the park and spoke to a homeless man, who was cloaked under a garbage bag. He shouts, “I’m a cosmonaut working for the CIA! You think you’re death?! I’m death!” before he dashes away, screaming.

Outside, it was raining heavily. It was nearly midnight. The auditorium emptied. Everyone migrated across the courtyard to the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art for the after-party.

I walked around and introduced myself to some people. They would ask me what film I worked on, and what my involvement was.

The most remarkable element of the Adrenaline Film Project was that these movies didn’t exist four days ago. The team members congregated to create a passion project to become the best possible version of itself. As a result, relationships were tested. The police were called. Fistfights may or may not have happened.

Negligible components of the story sparked interminable arguments. Dialogue, character attributes, costume decisions, and music composition were key matters of contention through the last ten minutes of the competition.

While much of the production – at least, for “Bottom Line” and “Kill for Her” – remained in flux throughout the past seventy-two hours, some original ideas from the beginning never changed and ended up secured in the final cut. Truthfully, impulsive decisions turned out to be the most profound parts of the film. Malcolm Gladwell might have had a point.

For Olivia Asuncion, who was born with a physical disability and has used a wheelchair since age 13, fire drills and building evacuations were always a source of panic and anxiety.

“I, for one, have been in many fire drills and evacuations where I definitely did not know what to do or where to go,” said Asuncion, who graduated from the University of Oregon with a master’s degree in architecture on Monday. She has a condition called osteogenesis imperfecta, which results in brittle bones that are more prone to injury.

“I’m very fortunate that I am small enough so that if worse comes to worst, anyone could just pluck me out of my chair and take me down the stairs. But not all disabilities are the same,” she said.

Since she started attending the UO, however, she’s alchemized this concern into research. Just three weeks before graduation, she placed first in an international competition for the Student Best Design Award from the Environmental Design Research Association.

Her design, which she started working on at the UO in fall 2013, investigates the issues concerning people with physical disabilities during building evacuations — and their potential solutions.

Informal interviews with physically disabled UO students aided Asuncion’s design work and provided anecdotal insight. One student told her that the idea of evacuating from a building’s upper floors is a scary and daunting experience.

“One of the most pertinent things she said was that she feels unprepared if there’s ever an evacuation on campus because of a lack of evacuation protocols,” said Asuncion. “Finding your way around buildings is really difficult.”

Asuncion’s design aims to improve fire safety and building evacuation for people with disabilities by making improvements to evacuation maps so they can be read by people with visual impairments and designing architectural wayfinding solutions that make it easier to navigate a building using tactile maps with texture and color contrast.

Her design also offered an accessible vertical means of egress, which allows building occupants to evacuate independently, and develop “a more visible and comfortable area of refuge” for those unable to evacuate, where occupants can find shelter in an event of an emergency, said Asuncion.

Asuncion, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of California in Berkeley in 2010, used Lawrence Hall and the John E. Jaqua Academic Center as case studies, but says her proposed design can be implemented elsewhere.

“I think a lot of the solutions I proposed apply to multi-family housing, commercial buildings, or entertainment buildings,” she said. “It’s most beneficial to have it be accessible for everyone.”

Architecture professor Jenny Young, who served as Asuncion’s research advisor, taught the seminar and says she encouraged Asuncion to continue her work on it.

“She has investigated an important topic – accessible evacuation – through multiple lenses: a comprehensive literature search, her own experience and on-the-spot experiments, and interviews with a broad range of stakeholders,” said Young.

Asuncion presented her poster during a four-day EDRA symposium in Los Angeles, and was announced as first-place winner on May 30.

According to the EDRA website, the Student Best Design Award criteria call for a design that demonstrates thorough research and an understanding of the relationship between human needs and the built environment, quality of graphic communication and representation, and alignment of the design with EDRA’s mission. EDRA accepts submissions of urban, landscape, architecture, interior, and industrial designs.

“It was a great honor and privilege to receive first place in the Student Best Design Award at EDRA,” wrote Asuncion via email. Though, she adds, the award was just “icing on a very delicious cake” compared with being able to share her research with other environmental design professionals.

Asuncion hopes that this research will encourage environmental designers to learn more about the inaccessibility of building evacuation.

“These changes can make architecture more beautiful but also widely usable. If we sear these lessons of accessibility and life safety and design into our brains instead of all those code-instituted measurements, we can potentially get rid of the term ‘universal design’ and turn it into just ‘design.’ Then the spaces that we build will be more inclusive, seamless, beautiful and safe,” she said.

In the two days that Paul Thomas Anderson was enrolled at New York University’s film program, he turned in part of a script by playwright David Mamet’s as his own. Then he dropped out. He withdrew his tuition money and used it to bankroll his first movie Coffee and Cigarettes in 1993.

Since then, Anderson has written and directed several movies, including Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), There Will Be Blood (2007), and Inherent Vice (2014).

Starting this month, the Northwest Film Center (934 SW Salmon St) in Portland will show all seven of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, as well as 14 films that formed his style.

The series, programmed and presented by the Northwest Film Center, begins on July 24 through Sept. 5. All screenings will take place in the Whitsell Auditorium (1219 Park Avenue) in Portland. As the website states, most of the films in this retrospective will be screened in 35mm, as all of Anderson’s movies are shot on film, as opposed to a digital print.

Check out a Q&A with NW Film Center’s Promotions Manager, Nick Bruno, and Exhibition Program Assistant, Morgen Ruff, as well as the series’ trailer, below.

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Emerald: What’s the significance of screening the movies in 35mm?

Nick Bruno: Well, generally speaking, if a film is at all available for screening from a physical print, that’s how we show it. We work with film archives, studios and even private collectors sometimes to secure quality 35, 16 and 8mm prints throughout the year. Yes, the vast majority of currently produced movies arrive at our doorstep on a hard drive, but our programming traffics in both current and retrospective content, so despite the advent of DCP [Digital Cinema Package], we still exhibit a lot of films via celluloid.

On a level specific to this series, Paul Thomas Anderson is a devout celluloid fan, insisting that his films be shot and, when possible, exhibited on 35mm. We’re all too happy to be respecting his wishes when it comes to how his films will be screened in our theater space.

Image from There Will Be Blood (Courtesy of Northwest Film Center)

PTA supposedly watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre every day during filming of There Will Be Blood. Why isn’t it included in this series?

NB:Treasure was certainly on the long list of films that Morgen and I were considering for the series. At the end of the day, we became more enamored by the comparison between Giant and Blood for a couple of reasons.

Anderson chose to shoot Blood in Marfa, Texas where George Stevens had shot Giant a half century earlier. Also comparing the two narratives is endlessly fascinating. Both films contain a birth of the oil/land barons theme, but Blood takes the ruination aspect found in Giant to a larger stage, playing it out beyond just the personal destruction of an individual, to illuminate more modern concerns like environmental impacts and all too human impulse to endlessly exploit natural resources.

Morgen Ruff: Nick nails it above. Treasure would have been in for atmospheric reasons over narrative/location/theme. Huston’s film is truly one of the most beautiful of the classical Hollywood era, but it’s also been screened a ton and we felt it was time to give the underrated Giant its due.

PTA also cites Kubrick as a main influence, and there are some tangible comparisons (the cinematography/camera lenses used in Barry Lyndon and Punch Drunk-Love; the scores of There Will Be Blood and The Shining) was it too tricky to choose just one Kubrick film for this series?

NB: 2001: A Space Odyssey was on the spreadsheet of possible titles, as was The Shining. Both the films and Kubrick’s vision are incredible, but get shown around town a lot.

MR: Like Nick says, those films are just screened too often. I’m sure we’d have a good turnout for The Shining, but we wanted to highlight some lesser-known films in this series.

Image from Jackie Brown (Courtesy of Northwest Film Center)

E: What sorts of PTA hallmarks could viewers find in these other films (the ensemble cast in Short Cuts; the cinematography of Jackie Brown)?

NB: Yeah, the ensemble thing and Robert Altman’s influence on that in particular was something that we wanted to highlight in this series. We could have just as easily picked Nashville to illuminate how much of a text Altman’s films have been for Anderson. Altman’s Popeye was considered, since Anderson borrows a song from it in Punch-Drunk Love, but it didn’t really get under the skin of the intersecting multiple stories/large ensemble cast thing as well as Short Cuts. The blueprint of how one successfully engages with that kind of structure comes directly from Altman and has indubitably informed Anderson’s experiments in that format of storytelling.

MR: Experimental, freewheeling camerawork with direct lineage from I Am Cuba to Boogie Nights. “Cop loses his gun” storyline, but also general atmosphere/existential malaise from Stray Dogs to Magnolia (John C. Reilly’s character in particular).

Image from Shoot The Piano Player (Courtesy of Northwest Film Center)

E: PTA is so methodical and deliberate, but still seems open to production mistakes and technical gaffes, all of which end up printed in the final cut. Are there some examples in this series of directors allowing blunders during production to end up in the final film?

NB: Well, I think the best directors often allow for these kinds of spontaneous gifts to emerge in all stages of the filmmaking process. Altman famously invited chaos to alter intention on his sets. And Cassavetes (whose The Killing of a Chinese Bookie features early in this series) was a grand master of orchestrating happy accidents based in improvisation, basically making the success or failure of how his stories were told a collaborative act between him, his cast and the technical players behind the scenes.

The second annual incarnation of Project Pabst finished last night in southwest Portland’s Zidell Yards. Weezer, Blondie, Run the Jewels and Passion Pit were among the acts that played during the two-day music festival.

Pabst flowed throughout festival grounds; Pabst was gargled by the fluid ton and Pabst stained the mountaintops. The blue-ribbon winner could be found almost everywhere.

Oftentimes during music festivals, especially when it’s hot out, someone in a crowd will crack open a water bottle and splash everyone in the vicinity. At this festival, whenever moshing broke out, several folks holding raised cans would be shoved and beer would take flight. Whenever you stood in a crowd and felt your shirt splashed with a fluid, it was only water about half the time.

Thee Oh Sees, while performing at the secondary Blue Ribbon stage, were among the first to wisecrack at the ubiquitous beer commercial in which we all stood.

“PBR?” asked frontman John Dwyer incredulously, as he wore his guitar strapped high on his chest. “You pussies.”

Someone shouted back, “We have no choice!”

Thee Oh Sees completed an outstanding set before I walked over to the main stage to see TV On the Radio. Frontman Tunde Adebimpe decried the punishing sun on first hello and carried the weight of the very fun set with tracks such as “Lazerray” and “Happy Idiot.”

After this, Run the Jewels took the secondary stage, located just beside the Ross Island Bridge. Several onlookers peered over the bridge to get a glimpse of Killer Mike and El-P.

The two walked onto stage as Queen’s “We Are The Champions” played. The always charismatic Killer Mike grabbed a microphone and boomed, “We’re gonna burn this stage like Portland weed, motherfucker” before the pair bounced into the track “Run the Jewels.”

And later, he elaborated, “Big thanks to Josh from Cannabis Collective for baking us a cherry pie,” which was the best commercial spot of the entire festival.

RTJ parsed out a few dedications, namely to the memories of Eric Garner and Michael Brown – two infamous cases of black men who were killed by police in 2014. In another sort-of shout-out, El-P graciously thanked Pabst and Portland for the show. Killer Mike finished with, “And fuck Donald Trump!” prior to their closer, “A Christmas Fucking Miracle.”

Blondie closed the night on the Captain Pabst stage with several hits, including “One Way Or Another,” “Call Me,” “The Tide Is High,” and closing with “Heart of Glass.” Active as a band since 1974, it’s not eminently clear whether Deborah Harry is still having fun singing these tracks.

Aimee Mann and Ted Leo make up The Both, whose masterful ease of playing made for a beautiful set on Day 2 of Project Pabst.

Mann’s “hummingbird trill” (as she put it) was immaculate and seductive, complemented by her bass playing and Lee’s guitar. They closed the set with a song written by each of them: Mann’s “Goodbye Caroline” and Leo’s “Bottled In Cork.”

Immediately thereafter, Passion Pit played “Little Secrets” at the main stage. The band was decorated with a light show that was trivialized by the mid-afternoon sun. Not even frontman Michael Angelakos’ raspy falsetto nor the band’s explosive synths could rouse much of a spark among those present.

For the final Pabst show, Weezer guitarist Brian Bell later stepped onto the main stage wearing a novelty beer-sipping helmet weighed down with two PBR tallboys. He tossed it into the front rows before the opener’s (“My Name is Jonas”) end.

The once-dorky, now-much-dorkier band played a vibrant, career-spanning set that included tracks old and new(ish). Following “Hash Pipe,” “El Scorcho,” and “Back to the Shack,” a handsomely bearded Rivers Cuomo, Weezer’s frontman, wordlessly raised a fist in the air between songs.

Cuomo is a hero. He played his spearmint-colored, sticker-covered guitar and sang tracks that he wrote in the nineties. These are songs about how he resembles Buddy Holly, how he doesn’t leave the garage, and how he’s always hopelessly falling in love with half-Japanese lesbians.

He’d go on to sing more recent tracks about his audacious celeb goals, like moving to Beverly Hills or becoming a superstar for whom “people will crane necks to get a glimpse of me and see if I am having sex” (“Troublemaker”).

Weezer’s celeb idealism was buffered with more humble reflections in the Project Pabst set, like: “I’ll eat my candy with the pork and beans” and “I’ll soon be naked, lying on the floor.”

]]>https://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/pbr-stains-the-mountaintops-in-2015-project-pabst-music-fest/feed/0emersonmaloneWorking in Tandemhttps://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/working-in-tandem/
https://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/working-in-tandem/#respondSun, 20 Mar 2016 19:52:57 +0000http://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/?p=464Read more Working in Tandem]]>A bike memorializing David Minor, a UO grad who was killed while riding his bicycle near the intersection of East 13th Avenue and Willamette Street. (Meerah Powell/Emerald)

After University of Oregon graduate David Minor, 27, was struck and killed while riding his bicycle on the corner of East 13th Avenue and Willamette Street in 2008, a bike was chained to a post at the intersection in his memory.

The “Ghost Bike” is a somber reminder of David’s fate, and emblematic of the often unsafe conditions for cyclists on 13th – Eugene’s most popular biking corridor and a one-way thoroughfare that many UO students take to get to campus. Zip-tied to David’s memorial is a sheet of paper that reads, “What if there were a safe 2-way buffered bike path similar to the one on Alder St. on the west side of campus?”

In 2012, the group — which focuses on transportation and livability issues within the community — began drafting a report to dramatically renovate the avenue. The redesign recommended installing a two-way bike path to streamline the campus commute along the 10 blocks.

The city government has since approved the project, as well as conducted more public outreach, solicited feedback, consulted business and property owners along 13th, reworked the designs and applied for grants to fund the project.

“When the group started this project a few years ago, it came from students’ concerns. It wasn’t even on the city’s radar,” said LiveMove President Dana Nichols. “Now the city has really taken it on as its own project.”

David’s parents, Eugene residents John and Susan Minor, offered $150,000 to support the avenue’s redesign. John and Susan have asked that the bikeway be named The David Minor Bikeway in memory of their son. Eugene’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee has also set aside $150,000 for when the project is installed.

LiveMove originally slated the project’s completion for summer 2015, but the grant application process may push the installation to summer 2017 at the earliest, said Rob Inerfeld, the transportation planning manager for the City of Eugene.

Joe McAndrew, a UO and LiveMove alumnus, worked as one of the three project managers on the group’s 13th Avenue concept plan.

“I hope the city and university can work to find the funding needed to improve safety and access between downtown, housing and the university soon,” said McAndrew.

In 2012, 13th & Olive, the massive student-housing complex, was being developed. The apartments would house up to 1,300 tenants, and the influx of students would need an efficient way to travel to and from campus, about a mile away.

Getting to campus on bike on the eastbound 13th Avenue is easy enough, but the return trip is more problematic. Some cyclists leaving campus use the sidewalk at Hilyard and 13th (where the westbound lane ends), instead of heading north to 12th Avenue to go west.

Counts from LiveMove and city government found that 30-40 percent of cyclists do the same.

Not only does this demonstrate the need for easier bike access on 13th, both LiveMove and city officials argue, but it creates a hazard for cyclists, pedestrians and motorists, who may not be looking for cyclists on the sidewalk.

Two-way cycle tracks have already been installed in cities across the country, such as New York City and Washington D.C.

LiveMove’s comprehensive 86-page report (which can be read on the group’s website) titled “Downtown-Campus Corridor Concept Plan” recognizes the potential for two-way bike lanes. The report visualized a two-way cyclist track painted in green, separated by a dotted line and buffered from the vehicle traffic.

The Oregon Chapter of the American Planning Association recognized LiveMove’s work with the Student Achievement in Planning award in May 2014.

The report determined that 13th would be the optimal route, as opposed to the alternatives. According to public feedback, it’s uncomfortable to ride next to cars and buses on 11th Avenue. 12th Avenue is an indirect route that’s bumpy, crosses busy intersections and is full of stop signs. 13th proved to be right in the Goldilocks zone, with a direct route between campus and downtown.

Inerfeld said that the project will cost roughly $1.5 million to $2 million, and those funds are not available, yet. The steep price tag is because existing traffic signals will be upgraded or newly installed.

The city has applied for at least two grants for the project, including one from the Oregon Department of Transportation’s All Roads Transportation Safety Program for about $1.3 million, and another grant for $1 million from the Central Lane Metropolitan Planning Organization.

Inerfeld said it’s a high priority to get the project funded, but it’s in a holding pattern until then.

However, the grant application process is complicated, since the city is also applying for finances for competing infrastructure projects around town.

Additionally, Inerfeld claimed the campus area has been decently accommodated in recent years, with the re-striping of Alder Street and concurrent redesign of 13th between Alder and Kincaid in 2012, the re-paving of 18th Avenue in 2008 and improvements made to Agate Street.

“This is a relatively big city, and we have to make sure we’re investing in neighborhoods all around Eugene,” he said.

Springfield Transportation Planner Emma Newman echoed this statement.

“There’s only so much money,” said Newman, who contributed research to the redesign as a UO student and member of LiveMove. “There are so many other priorities across the city that things happen on a slower bureaucratic timeline.”

Newman joined the student group during a consultation with Congressman Peter DeFazio’s staff to request federal finances.

In March, Karen Hyatt, the UO’s director of local community and neighborhood relations, and City Engineer Mark Shoening drafted a letter endorsing the project to Gov. Kate Brown’s Transportation Advisor Karmen Fore. The letter asks for state and/or federal funds for the project.

“The UO has a strong self-interest in ensuring that people who access and leave campus by bike do so safely and comfortably and values that bicycling is integral to the community culture,” read the letter. “We are pursuing many different traditional options for project funding, but many do not seem likely before 2020 and we are anxious to get started.”

Despite this letter of support, the UO has not put any money down to endorse the plan.

“This is a badly needed project and it’d be great to see the university step up and collaborate with the city to get it completed,” said McAndrew. “While not on the grounds of campus, I feel [the UO] has a responsibility to provide students, faculty, and visitors safe access to and from the school.”

You can donate to help the 13th Avenue redesign here. Those interested can also write to Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy and the Eugene City Council members.

“The more students know about it, the more they’ll pressure the community, and the more likely it’ll happen,” said Newman.

Although they’re surrounded by a lab of high-end brewing technology, the employees of Viking Braggot, Eugene’s only braggot brewery, don’t need to use swords and axes to hack pumpkins and squashes for their brews. But they do it for the hell of it.

Brewery co-founders Daniel McTavish and Addison Stern, along with brewmaster Perry Ames use these primitive weapons for their Ulfbehrt Double Pumpkin Wit (named for the legendary Viking sword) and their seasonal release winter squash porter. The former uses roasted pumpkins as a base with pumpkin blossom honey for the hefeweizen-style brew; for the latter, delicata winter squash and turnip honey fall into the mix.

“We brew on such a small system that we can really do fun hands-on things that bigger breweries can’t,” McTavish said. “You could just chop ‘em with a knife on a cutting board, but a sword’s more fun.”

This past Saturday, Viking Braggot celebrated its second anniversary.

Despite being located in the sprawl of west Eugene, Viking Braggot celebrated its second anniversary with a bustling attendance; the taproom offered air-conditioned refuge from the punishing midday sun for its bacon-braggot-sipping patrons. Attendants played card games, billiards and a chess match on a medieval-themed set under the string of lightbulbs suspended above the bar.

Outdoors, a duo performed live music with banjo and guitar as Eugene-based food truck Bacon Nation barbecued brisket, chicken and several side dishes, such as bacon mac and cheese — all because two former University of Oregon students decided to tap the power of a niche market.

McTavish and Stern were both studying business administration in the UO Lundquist College of Business entrepreneurship program. A group project involved conceptualizing a business model and identifying a potential headquarters. The concept of a “blue ocean” was repeated ceaselessly in the program. In any given industry, you want to find your own blue ocean where you can carve a niche to differentiate yourself from competitors.

They were interested in brewing, but a startup beer brewery seemed like a far-fetched idea in Oregon, where they’d have to compete against roughly 40 other breweries in the Willamette Valley alone.

“From the beginning we knew that beer was out,” Stern said. “With braggot, we found that it was sort of in the alternative category with ciders and meads. We saw it as a way to differentiate ourselves while staying in the beer industry.”

The class project became a tangible reality after they graduated in spring 2012. That December, McTavish and Stern signed a lease for a warehouse in West Eugene. They spent six months experimenting with recipes and purchasing equipment before finally opening their doors in June 2013.

Braggots are a delicate balance between grains, hops, honey and herbs. The brewery often crafts recipes with herbs and tea blends, including Tulsi tea and milk thistle seed.

During the Viking Age (793 – 1066 A.D.), the technology behind purified water wasn’t around. Pasteurization was centuries from being invented. Drinking the water could kill you, so anything you drank was either boiled or fermented.

Mead (which was expensive) and beer (which was cheap) were blended together to make braggot.

“It takes a long time to learn, especially with beer,” said Ames. “If you mess up something, you don’t know for a while, and you have to start over again.”

The brewing process – whether it’s beer, mead, cider or braggot – is conducive to plenty of trial and error. For McTavish and Stern, who began brewing braggot as juniors at the University of Oregon, the problem was finding the right yeast.

Since a braggot’s recipe uses honey for fermentation – with anywhere from 52 to 90 pounds of it in a 200-gallon, six-barrel batch – the brewing process can take a week or two longer than it takes to brew beer because the yeast needs to break down the complex sugars in honey and convert it to alcohol. If the yeast doesn’t eat the honey, it can be a cloyingly sweet brew. If it eats too much honey, it would wind up with about 18 percent alcohol by volume.

“With the braggot style, it’s a blank canvas,” McTavish said. “We can do whatever we want.”

“I wish I could tell you how many [recipes] we’ve sold in these first two years,” said Stern. “It’s probably been over a hundred.”

The most popular brews at Viking Braggot are the year-round releases: Reverence Red, a red ale-style braggot brewed with orange blossom honey, and the Battle Axe IPA, an IPA-style braggot with wildflower honey and several hops. The website states the Battle Axe is a “Viking spin on our favorite Northwest style.” Another of Viking’s IPA-styles, the Pineapple braggot, is made with fresh-cut pineapple and tropical blossom honey that mask the bitter hops of a standard IPA.

“More can be done than an IPA – tone down the hops a bit, bring in some unique ingredients and flavor profiles and give people the next thing,” said Stern. “We want to help people move beyond the IPA.”

Glass for glass, Viking Braggot costs about the same as brews from Oregon’s other small craft breweries. It’s sold both bottled and on tap at roughly thirty growler fill stations, bars, markets and restaurants between Roseburg and Portland. It can be found in Eugene at Cornucopia, Growler University, Laughing Planet, Starlight Lounge and several other locations.

Ames, who’s actively researched Viking culture, notes that around 745 A.D. Viking raiders would ransack churches in England and come home with a bounty of stolen fortune.

“It was so easy and they got so much gold and treasure that when they went back home, everybody thought it was a good idea to join them. Scandinavia was getting kind of crowded,” Ames said on the brewery’s outdoor patio, “and there was a lot of young men looking for something to do.”

This interview is part of a larger story about the unique courses offered at the University of Oregon, which can be read here.

Political Science 407: “Black Lives Matter”

What goes on: Centered around Michael Brown’s death and the riots that followed in Ferguson, Missouri, this seminar will focus on the social movement and connect its principles to the multiple instances of police abuse, redlining, income inequality, student activism and the history of segregation in America.

When it’s offered: begins Winter 2016.

Credits: 4.

Hours in class per week: 2 hours 40 minutes.

Course fees or prerequisites: None.

Emerald: What do you have planned for the seminar?

Daniel HoSang: A lot of it is going to be putting the last year and a half of events into context for students, from “Hands up” to [Michael Brown’s death and the following riots in] Ferguson to [Freddie Gray’s death in] Baltimore. It’s just police abuse, but also segregation, income inequality. The last part of the course will connect it to student activism and in particular, the way racial justice activists have viewed college campuses and higher education as an important site for their work. It’s about making connections between Ferguson, Black Lives Matter and larger movements for racial justice.

When the Black Lives Matter representatives met with Hillary Clinton, it seemed like both sides were telling each other that they needed the other one to tell them what to do. Mainstream democrats and white liberals, in particular, have quite intentionally shied away from race and racial inequality. That’s where the sentiment comes from the BLM activist, which is ‘You have to take initiative and figure out why it’s important and what role it’s going to take in your platform.’ And that’s the same thing they said to Bernie Sanders. That’s part of what challenged him. If you’re really going to represent everyone and be a progressive leader, you have to have something to say about this.

It was a much more aggressive way they confronted Bernie. It was a much more cordial exchange with Clinton, overall. I think that’s more a product of the kind of access they had. The Bernie event in Seattle was planned by activists. Whereas Clinton handlers, when they saw that developing knew they had to engage the Black Lives Matters out in the open. They’re not operating from one national office, so they’re actually quite autonomous from one another.

What is the homework going to look like? We’re going to read. It’s going to be centered in Ferguson, starting with Michael Brown’s shooting, looking at its history of education segregation, redlining, income inequality and unwinding back from that. The rich set of documents and analysis about St. Louis [from the Department of Justice] will be used as a case study.

There will be a chance for students to develop their own research projects related to BLM. The course is trying to show students’ relationships between these events so we don’t just see it as an individual conflict between two people, but it’s connected to different structures. Together with students, we figure out what the connections are between why this happened and what can be done to address it.

What implications did the Department of Justice’s investigation have for Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed Brown? It might be easier to understand if he were a rogue officer operating outside the law. But the more damning part is that [Wilson] was not just acting within the law, but within a really coordinated approach to public policy that continually reinforces racial segregation and exploitation. Ticketing people for very minor infractions who couldn’t pay, and using the money to keep the city government going. That sets that context for why Darren Wilson would so aggressively confront Michael Brown.

]]>https://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/qa-with-black-lives-matter-seminar-professor-daniel-hosang/feed/0emersonmaloneScreen-shot-2015-09-30-at-1.16.46-PM.pngTitus Andronicus explores new aesthetic of anxiety in ‘The Most Lamentable Tragedy’https://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/titus-andronicus-explores-new-aesthetic-of-anxiety-in-the-most-lamentable-tragedy/
https://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/titus-andronicus-explores-new-aesthetic-of-anxiety-in-the-most-lamentable-tragedy/#respondSun, 20 Mar 2016 19:33:25 +0000http://emersonmalone.wordpress.com/?p=421Read more Titus Andronicus explores new aesthetic of anxiety in ‘The Most Lamentable Tragedy’]]>Somewhere in the middle of The Most Lamentable Tragedy– a 93-minute, 29-song monolith – it becomes clear that New Jersey punk-rock outfit Titus Andronicus isn’t really into the whole brevity thing. But as frontman Patrick Stickles rightfully told Grantland in an interview, the record can be enjoyed on a macro level, as well as in the micro scale.

This punk opera in five acts is the fourth studio release from Titus and by far its most ambitious album. Tragedy’s narrative dives into ugly, vulnerable depths. It takes a close look at its protagonist’s self-loathing, hubris and open wounds, which ultimately become his undoing. It gracefully journeys through arena-metal tracks, piano-heavy rockabilly ballads and unhinged thrash jams, as manic as the story’s hero.

Tragedy is spotted with covers of Daniel Johnston’s “I Had Lost My Mind,” The Pogues’ “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” and an awkward rendition of the standard “Auld Lang Syne.” Stickles, who wrote all the original tracks, also throws in references to Hamlet, Don McLean, Charles Bukowski and Friedrich Nietzsche.

It’s impregnated with plenty of stand-alone tracks that are fantastic and undeniable, like “Lonely Boy,” in which the protagonist declares he’s going to stay inside and stare at the ceiling. Stickles cries: “Let me tell you how it goes here in the big city / There ain’t no mercy and there ain’t no pity / And everywhere you turn there are hundreds of humans / All opening the door, saying, ‘Hello, Newman.’” (In a track about embracing your loneliness, there’s always room for a Seinfeld reference.)

The protagonist is visited from a doppelgänger in the 49-second “Lookalike” (“He don’t look like me but we look alike!”). He turns to medicating his problem on the wonderful single “Fired Up” and acts out in the fatalistic rage of “Dimed Out,” in which Stickles screams, “As long as there’s a law, I’ll be a criminal.”

Then, the epic ten-minute chapter “More Perfect Union,” a callback to the band’s 2010 release The Monitor, starts soft and quiet, but gets louder and faster before it swerves into a deranged punk score. In its final two minutes, a repeated melody cycles around and around until it swings into a dizzying carnival ride of instrumentation, followed by a 78-second silent intermission.

A new act of the story opens with “Sun Salutation,” in which a choir repurposes a Catholic aphorism for the Egyptian sun god: “Glory to Ra in the highest.”

Later our hero turns to get his fix in “Fatal Flaw” in which he says he’s “waiting on some drug deal all the time.” The album closes with “Stable Boy,” which is Stickles alone with a wheezy chord organ. The track was recorded on cassette, the same method as the first verse on the opening track of Titus’s debut The Airing of Grievances. This makes for a symmetrical career benchmark, if this is the band’s final bow.

Tragedy is an excellent counterpart to The Monitor, a lo-fi and relentlessly vicious concept album that likens the brutality and violence of the Civil War to the all-around bummer of living in Jersey. Take, for example, the Monitor’s third track; it’s bookended with (a) a warbly reading of a letter from Abraham Lincoln, in which he pouts, “I am now the most miserable man living,” and (b) the whole band sing-screaming the panicky refrain “You will always be a loser!” nearly thirty consecutive times.

The group is not only a skilled conductor of musicianship, but of storytelling as well. Whereas Monitor was a barbaric feat, Tragedy is polished and manicured, but still remarkably savage. It’s wildly ambitious and pays off handsomely. It’s a tragedy, but it’s undoubtedly a triumph.